This I think is about the fist five minutes I have had in the last week to do anything, never mind blog writing, and I am now sat in the car on the way to skiing tapping away on my phone. With pig slaughter, the ensuing work from that, pork sales, plumbing disasters and a few other things chucked in I am feeling ready for the break. We have Christine and Kevin at home animal sitting and kindly decorating the kids bedroom. If anyone else fancies decorating our house while we are away or even while we are here, do get in touch. I may have to start a waiting list on that offer.
I would like to apologise now for the grammar, spelling etc being worse than ever this time as writing on a phone is a bit of a pain.
So the pigs having gone to the abattoir near York and we then collected them from a butcher somewhere east of Hull. Harriett and I set off first thing Saturday morning to collect them. They were very helpful at the butcher and went through all the bags of meat explaining what they all were. There were a lot of bags.
Once home the work really started. Initially it was just sorting, bagging and freezing loads of chops and roasting joints. The chest freezer I recently bought on ebay quickly started to fill. We then started on the sausage making. With the aid of the Kitchen Aid, Zoe and I minced a couple of kilos of belly and shoulder, added some flavours and attempted to force it all into sausage skins. Amazingly it went pretty well and apart from the odd skin splitting, we soon had a sizeable pile of bangers.
After lunch (sausages) we started on hams and bacon. Hams were tessellated into plastic tubs and covered with brine, bacon salted and a whole leg placed on a bed of salt and then coated in it too. This will hopefully be an air dried ham. I am a little worried about this as it's a whole leg and can go wrong. But I think we should manage some fantastic air dried ham.
The weekend continued in much the same way, more meat to deal. By Sunday night we were warn out and enjoying our first piece of roast pork. It was stunning and we felt well deserved. I don't think I've worked for 7 months on a roasting joint before.
Through the weekend we were also getting visits from people buying sausages, chops and roasting joints. I am wondering now whether to get three pigs next time. Two for us and one to sell the meat.
The rest of the weeks been a bit of a blur including a minor heating emergency when I managed to break the heating while doing a bit of maintenance.
Well just finished my seed order while sat in the car here. Just got umpteen veg beds to dig for them now when I get back.
Mmm either the blogger app or F1 hotel wifi doesn't like photos, so sorry can't add any.
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